Drag the edges of the image around until it looks right. The lines are very important, use them to help keep it realistic. Ctrl-R will also give you a ruler which you can then drag to wherever you need (eg to align a horizon).

Ctrl-H to hide any lines to check your work

Click the tick at the top when you’re happy

I tried using Warp on this image but found it looked better without it, Photoshop had done a reasonable job on its own and my skill levels aren’t up to making it better.

Optional – if you know you’ll want to crop regardless, crop here. It’ll save time rather than having PS fill empty areas you’re only going to cut away anyway.

Then use content-aware fill to cover any gaps:

Hold down Ctrl/Cmd and click in the thumbnail of the new layer. This will select the area with pixels

Select -> Inverse, or Ctrl-Shift-I/Cmd-Shift-I

Edit -> Fill, or Shift-F5, then select Content Aware and OK

Wait for magic to happen!

Ctrl-D/Cmd-D to remove selection outline

It’s not perfect, and with this image I still cropped a bit, especially to the left as there was unnecessary space there anyway, but it meant I was able to keep the silhouette of the fern which I really liked (mind you, had I realised the fern was there when I was taking the panorama in the first place, I would have taken more photos to the right to capture it. It was very dark though!).

I was very excited to see how the panorama would turn out, so I’ve only done the barest of post-processing on this image and I’m not entirely happy with it yet (a bit green perhaps?). I’ll write-up more on capturing this panorama in another post.

Lately I’ve become interested in astrophotography. Not so much shooting galaxies in deep space (yet), but capturing star trails and the Milky Way are my two of my latest challenges (along with panoramas, HDR, and all of Photoshop. Focus, haha, is not my strongest point).

So far the most important lesson has been that you can focus past infinity! Who knew! Turns out beyond infinity is quite fuzzy and doesn’t make for the greatest photograph. I had my best luck by having the camera focus on something at least 10 metres away, like torchlight lighting up a tree, but I learnt the hard way to check, check, then check again zoomed in as much as your camera will allow on your LCD. Infinity is often slightly to the left if where it’s marked on your lens; on my to-do list is to mark exactly where it is on my lenses.

Otherwise, many of the usual things for long exposures apply to astrophotography:

Tripod

Remote release or timed release – no vibration from shutter pressing

Turn off IS/VR

One I keep forgetting: Take a black exposure, ie with the lens cap on. It can be used to remove noise by stacking software

A focus trick: Turn off auto focus. Look at Live View, zoom aaaaaall the way in with zoom buttons, manually focus on a bright star until it’s a sharp point. Don’t touch the lens again!

For the Milky Way:

High ISO

Likely no longer than 30 seconds exposure, otherwise you’ll start to get star trails. Test this however, it is dependent on your focal length

Get that black exposure!

Conversely, for star trails:

Low ISO

20-30 second exposures, but play with this. The longer the exposure, the more noise, but also more stars

For star trails, I’ve had some reasonable success with Star Stax. It’s not perfect, but it was how I was able to put together this star trail taken over my house, in suburban Brisbane (yes the house is ugly, we’re planning a renovation which has its own blog at Gecko Reno).

Southern Celestial Pole over my house

I’d like to say I knew the Southern Celestial Pole was there, but I did not. I was expecting some arcs and mostly just out there to learn and practise, so it was quite a kick to see the pole. Given it’s my first attempt I’m not unhappy with this at all.

My first Milky Way is less successful. This was taken up near Ballandean, in Queensland’s Granite Belt region. The Granite Belt is up to 900 metres above sea level, and the coolest region in Queensland, so it makes for beautiful clear skies (I wrote about a previous visit to the region here). Unfortunately the weather wasn’t really playing ball; a strong wind blew regular clouds and rain squalls over us so I only had a short window to play in. This is the best attempt, but I’m not really happy with the noise or the composition or the wow factor of the stars.

Milky Way over the Granite Belt

The following night I had another short go. My husband insisted on trying some 60 second exposures – I was dubious thinking we’d end up with star trails, but actually that was ok. Less ok is the noise and the hot pixels, but then they’re only visible when pixel peeping which is a bad habit of mine developed from submitting images to stock photography sites. I’d be interested to know which photo people prefer!

Milky Way 60 seconds

Will also liked the stars being blue. Post-processing these images is an art in itself which I can’t claim to have come to grips with but I’m working on. These Lightroom presets by David Kingham, and the accompanying videos, have helped immensely however. The presets are donation-ware and I’ve donated, if you find them useful I recommend that you do too. I can vouch that sussing this stuff out on your own isn’t straight-forward, especially the white balance.

On a final note: my uncle sent me this interesting video of a lecture given by Barbara Cunow. Cunow is an amateur photographer who’s photographed all 110 Messier objects, with minimal equipment and terrible light pollution but some smart photography and processing techniques to compensate. A lot to learn!

I love astronomy. There’s nothing to give you a sense of perspective than staring up at the stars and realising just how old the light that’s reaching your eye right that second is. The vast distance in both time and space. The gigantic sizes involved. Then remembering that all matter in the universe, including you and me and the cat and our mobiles and the garbage bag and the works of Picasso and of course Picasso himself and everything in between, was all born from stars. We’re made of stars. Out there is what our nursery looked like. And our moon is some of the debris, just like us.

The Full Moon in all its glory

Tonight, on my upside-down side of the world, we were treated to a partial eclipse of the moon. A partial eclipse is where just a little bit of the earth gets between the sun and the moon, so the earth’s shadow falls across the moon. This is relatively rare because the sun is big and the earth is not and the universe moves in three dimensions. It differs from the dark new moon as at those times, the moon is between us and the sun.

– if your lens has image stabilisation or vibration reduction, turn it off. The slight motion of the motors adjusting your focus will mean you lose precious lunar detail

The best photos of the moon are usually silhouetting something of interest. I haven’t found something appropriate near me yet, but I haven’t stopped looking either. I’d also like to try exposing for the red shadow, but I totally forgot about that at the time.

Oh, and I got a great big bite on my bum. The local mozzies clearly aren’t very appreciative of moderately rare astral phenomenon.